Where Islam spreads, freedom dies

An upcoming autobiography from press baron Conrad Black reveals that Pope Benedict lamented the 'slow suicide of Europe' because of Muslim immigration.

Buried away on page 48 of the former press proprietor Conrad Black’s superb, soon-to-be-published autobiography, A Matter of Principle, is the answer to a burning question that very many people have been asking for several years: What does the pope really think about Islamic immigration into Europe?

... Lord Black’s authoritative and highly readable new memoir (full disclosure: I’m a dedicatee) reveals that at a small dinner party given at the home of Cardinal Gerald Emmett Carter, the then–cardinal archbishop of Toronto, in 1990, the then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—now Pope Benedict—"lamented 'the slow suicide of Europe:' its population was aging and shrinking, and the unborn were being partly replaced by unassimilable immigrants. He thought that Europe would awake from its torpor, but that there were difficult days head."

... thanks to Lord Black’s fascinating book we now know what the pope really thinks, and indeed thought back in 1990, even before the last two decades of mass immigration into Europe from African and Middle Eastern Muslim countries. For the phrase "unassimilable immigrants" cannot refer to anyone else, because there was no large-scale immigration into Europe at that time from any other peoples who fit that description. The largely unassimilated Muslim populations of Germany, France, Holland, Italy, and Britain were undoubtedly what His Holiness was discussing, and in his (correct) view they represent "the slow suicide of Europe," or at least the Christian Europe for which he should be the prime spokesman. It was Arnold Toynbee who wrote in his multicivilizational work The Study of History that "Civilizations die from suicide, not murder." Now we know that the pope agrees with him, but only in private, not in public, just in case the reaction is too unpleasant.